The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

In gridlock on U.S. 1, Derek calls. “We’re going to see a lot of each other.”

  I finger the lapel of my suit jacket, caress the handle of my gun.

  “You haven’t seen enough of me today?”

  The driver behind me honks his horn.

  “What are you talking about?” Derek says.

  “You leave Kathi again?”

  His voice deflates. “Aurora’s placed you under 24/7

  protection.”

  To safeguard me from the snake? Or from that low-life blast-ing his horn in the car behind mine?

  “Derek, I’ll call you back.”

  The guy behind me is early thirties, trimmed beard, suit, late-model gray Jaguar sedan. He gives me the finger. I pull forward, but he leans on his horn again. He’s picked the wrong moment on the wrong day to piss off the wrong woman. But what am I going to do? Unholster my gun, pull him out of his car, handcuff him to his steering wheel, jam the horn, activate the car alarm, and treat him to other virtuoso performances of road-rage retaliation?

  I have no life. Aurora wants me out of the country, out of the way. This has something to do with Andrew, something she isn’t telling me. But no. If I know anything, I know Aurora deserves my trust. This is just Aurora being Aurora: concerned, overly protective, loving.

  My mother calls. I tell her what happened in court, what Murray said during lunch. She suggests that we take a trip, camp in the Everglades for four or five weeks. That would make spend-ing eight hours with Derek jangling my nerves feel like a day on the French Riviera.

  The part of my life I must rethink is men; there’s never been one I could depend on. Maybe I should be gay, go to a lesbian bar tonight. But looking as I do, even a man wouldn’t want me.

  Maybe spending time with my mother is what I need. I can’t be certain what she knows about men. She was never serious about a man after my father was killed. But she never got involved with a fuckup like Karl or a jellyfish like Derek.

  Now she wants to take me into the swamp, eat what we kill. The last time she and I did that was decades ago, after my father was killed. We camped on cypress domes, hunted, fished, gathered roots and plant leaves. That soothed my grief, but I’ve refused to go back, rejecting her Seminole and African heritage, claiming for myself my father’s white heritage, trying to live a white woman’s life in a white woman’s world.

  “If you say yes,” she says, “I’ll visit Andrew and find out what you want to know.”

  I could draft a list of questions, teach her how to lead, how to follow up, conspire to violate the injunction.

  “I can’t let you do that, Momma, but let’s spend a few weeks together in the Glades.”

  Traffic picks up; I’m going fifteen, twenty. Ten seconds pass, fifteen, twenty-five. “Momma? Momma?” She doesn’t answer but she doesn’t have to. I picture her face: a visage of joy masking a vision of profound sorrow.

  In the Everglades, I stalk a wild boar. I’ve been looking for a sow no larger than 150 pounds, as the meat of a larger animal would be less succulent. But it’s already late afternoon; I’m tired. This one is at least 250 pounds, five-inch yellow cutters. I’ve seen a charging boar gore a careless hunter, rip open his femoral artery, a reprise of Hemmingway’s “Capital of the World.” But I don’t think about danger. I keep my mind on the hunt, think about quartering and field dressing the carcass.

  Keeping my face to the wind, I steal to within thirty yards of where the old hog roots around, framed like a bull’s-eye by the serried leaf of palmetto. I’m not distracted by mosquitoes, giant orchids, birds diving for gar, or manatees bobbing in the waters beyond the clearing.

  I have the boar in the sights of my mother’s 7.5-inch-barrel Ruger Redhawk .44 magnum. When he turns, I’ll bring him down with a single bullet behind his shoulder. But then, like a predictable plot twist in popular fiction, the wind shifts. The hog faces me; I shoot. The bullet grazes the front of his shoulder, which is protected by thick hide, layers of fat, and a clavicle of steel. Squealing, he charges. His pink eyes narrow, his nostrils flare. Buck teeth. Pony tail. Crimson scar. In the pig’s face, I see the perp’s face. Nirvana obliterated as I aim and squeeze off the remaining shots rapidly but deliberately, methodically, shred-ding his skull into blood-drenched fragments. Pink-and-gray neural matter oozes from where his ears had been.

  Homicidal thoughts. I don’t like myself for having them, but they’re better than the fear that I’m being followed, a canoe behind mine or waiting in ambush behind a mangrove, that in gatherings of red faces I see a white face, a menacing face, a hateful face—when I’m not expecting to see it, when it’s not there.

  My guilt, my sorrow combines with denial and rage. What happened? To me? To my son? What kind of a mother was I?

  Yet I’ve gained self-knowledge, perspective in these past few weeks, allowing my mother to love me as I should have when my father was killed. I blamed her for Karl’s incarceration even though it was my testimony that sent him to prison. I’ve told her I’ll make amends, but she says she’s perceived no insult, that I had understandable troubles in my teens.

  Like me, my mother insists that Andrew did not, would not conspire to have me raped. And what’s more, she insists that I’ve done nothing to warrant blame.

  I've listened when she’s played rock ’n’ roll and enjoyed it, though I still have more admiration for the alternative rock bands of my generation – U 2, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails – musicians who had the character to avoid arrest and drug addiction. But whatever the differences in our musical tastes, my mother never was a flower child. She was a child of the flowers, a shaman.

  The boar, dead before his body knew it, drops less than five yards from me. Pieces of his skull, snout, and brains leave a gory trail of shredded and shattered organic matter that moments before belonged to a living mammal. Adrenaline coursing through his body has turned his carcass into a feast for the gators, for the turkey vultures.

  The sights, sounds, and smells of the Everglades blend as my awareness unfurls like a flower in bloom. But before the bud can fully unfold, one afternoon during a visit to the Miccosukee Big Cypress Reservation, I receive a text from Aurora: perp caught. come home.

  He is Jan van Keet, age twenty-eight. There’s no doubt about his guilt, reasonable or otherwise. He mirrors the description I gave the police, the Nirvana tattoo on his forearm a brand of guilt, the crimson scar on his forehead a mark of Cain. His fingerprints and hair fibers were in my apartment, his semen on my bed sheets, his handwriting on the demeaning note, and more. He took pictures of me nude, bloodied, unconscious. Why? What has this sick, twisted version of humanity done with them?

  The State of Florida charges him with sodomy, aggravated rape, sexual battery, kidnapping (dragging me against my will and by force from my bed onto the floor and then moving me by threat of force back onto the bed), assault, extortion, breaking and entering, home invasion, robbery (my father’s gun has never been found), burglary, hate crimes, and conspiracy to commit all of these crimes (with Andrew) and a host of lesser-included offenses. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  There is a misdemeanor charge filed by my office – assault-and-battery on a federal officer, me, which appears to be superfluous until I find out more. Van Keet is a South African citizen, an operative in a diamond-smuggling and money-laundering cartel being investigated by other attorneys in my office.

  Van Keet says Andrew worked for him and didn’t have diamonds he was supposed to deliver, says Andrew gave him the key to our condo, telling him the missing diamonds were in his bedroom, says that Andrew said, “My mom’s hot. She likes it rough. Have fun with her.”

  Van Keet cuts a deal with the state attorney and the U.S. Attorney, Aurora’s boss. He’ll incriminate and testify against the cartel brass – presently laundering over thirty-million dollars a month in the U.S. – in exchange for dismissal of the state charges and a plea of guilty to the federal charge, one year in a minimum-security-federal penitentiar
y, and then extradition to South Africa, where he’ll have immunity and a new identity in a witness-protection program.

  When I hear this, I storm Aurora’s office.

  “After what that man did to me, he gets a year in a country club, no bars, no fences, a gym, tennis courts, horses?”

  She’s rifling files, looks up at me, says in her sweetest voice, “Will you help me?”

  She hands me a photo of a snarling convict, shaved head, and forearms that make Van Keet’s look like pencils. The caption under his photo says, Gregory de Vito, Aryan Brother-hood, six-one, two-fifteen, twenty years for mayhem and transporting minor boys across state lines.

  A man in another photo she shows me also has a shaved pate, but his has diagonal scars that cross his head like dissection marks. His photo’s caption says: Eugenio Alexandro Martinez, Cuban Mafia, six-three, two-twenty-five, eight years for narcotics trafficking with a six-year enhancement for raping an inmate.

  “These cons would appreciate a year’s transfer to minimum security,” Aurora says. “Which one should be van Keet’s cell-mate?”

  I stagger, literally, under the weight of what she proposes, sit on the one chair in her office not covered with files and pleadings. Her suggestion violates more laws than van Keet was charged with. Of one thing I’m sure. Vigilante justice makes the world unsafe.

  “You can’t do this,” I say.

  She regards me with astonishment. “Gregory or Eugenio will protect van Keet, make sure he gets out of minimum security alive. I have their word. And Uncle Sam will provide van Keet with a set of false teeth when he’s released.”

  No way will I accede to this subterfuge, sink so low. The muscles in my shoulders cramp. I cross my legs, fold my arms.

  I thought I knew Aurora, held her in the highest regard. Never would I have imagined she’d descend into the muck.

  She pours me a cup of tea.

  I point to the photo of Martinez. “Six months with him, then six months with the other!”

  The mountain range of ice that’s crushed my chest melts, the pressure dissipating with the faint sound of a reptile’s hiss like air from a pinpricked punctured inner tube. I take a tissue from a pink-and-white floral box on Aurora’s desk, dab my eyes, and say, “What’s up all the time with the tears?”

  Wearing a plaid 1940s suit ensemble in earth tones – high-neck fitted jacket and matching dress – standing, I wait outside the courtroom where Andrew’s preliminary hearing is being held. Derek stands beside me.

  “You have lipstick on your teeth,” he says.

  I rub my tongue over my new permanent caps; the visits to the dentist I thought would never end finally have. I can eat apples but not without occasional twinges of pain. My jaw is still inflamed, the TMJ syndrome remains. I’ve only gained five pounds. Thank God for Misty, always ready to shop.

  The physical reminders of the rape are less daunting than the other kind, the kind that’s embarrassed me in meetings or in court when I’ve choked up, losing my composure for reasons I understand but cannot explain. The nightmares have yet to sub-side.

  Misty, Aurora, my mother have urged me to see a counselor, but how would that go? Would the therapist read what I wrote on the intake form – People say my son sent this man to rape me, but he didn’t – close the file and say to me, “What does your son say?”

  Derek’s partner, Edgar—blond, crew cut—smiles at me. He wears a navy-blue suit, powder-blue shirt, and white-and-blue-paisley silk tie, a step up from Derek’s plaid-sport-coat-and-brown-loafers look. He leans against a wall, looking as if he’d look great wearing nothing.

  “Is Edgar married?” I say.

  Jealousy blanches Derek’s cheeks, stills his watchful eyes.

  We should play poker,” I say.

  “Divorced,” Derek says.

  Edgar looks at me, his smile radiating warmth. Has he done that before? I return the smile. Maybe in two years. If we’re both still single.

  Lawyers in suits – some shabby, some elegant – read files, talk in hushed or excited tones to blue-collar workers, to bankers, to the glamorous, to the down-on-their luck. Cops loiter, talking to one another, looking bored, waiting.

  The solid-core cypress doors of Murray’s courtroom swing open. The perp, wearing chains around his waist and ankles over an orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed behind his back, is escorted out of the preliminary hearing by two mesomorphic deputy sheriffs. His face is puffy. His eyes are lifeless buttons of coal. It’s the first time he’s seen me since the rape, and he sneers. Tomorrow he’ll be transferred to the federal penitentiary, not knowing what’s waiting for him there. But to my shame and satisfaction, I know.

  Edgar and one of the deputies acknowledge each other with nods. Edgar strolls over to them and the deputies abruptly jerk van Keet to a halt.

  Poking van Keet’s chest, Edgar says something that I can’t hear but I do hear the lawmen’s derisive laughter. Van Keet shrinks back, squirms.

  “Come along, sweetheart,” one of the deputies says as they drag their prisoner away.

  The bailiff and Connie Knight come out of the courtroom. The bailiff calls my name.

  I’ve only come to court at Derek’s insistence. “You’re going to have to live with this decision,” he said. “Don’t make it until you’re there.”

  I’d thought I’d feel guilty when I saw van Keet. I don’t. My complicity in the conditions of his incarceration constitutes conspiracy, misuse of the power of my office, aiding and abetting battery and sodomy. If I can do that, disobeying a subpoena is trifling.

  My decision made, my lot thrown in with the lawless, I say, “I’m not going in.”

  Connie Knight says, “If you won’t testify, you should tell that to the judge.”

  “How dare you speak to me?” I say.

  Derek places his hand on my shoulder, and I turn on him.

  “What? You think I’m going to hit her?” I say, raising my voice. “If I were going to knock that supercilious look off her face, I’d have already done it.”

  In an audible gasp, she sucks in air as if she had been hit and steps back. Edgar stands near us, crosses his muscular arms, chews gum, says nothing. Two cops approach, hands on the butts of their guns. Edgar holds out his badge; the cops walk away.

  A courier leaves the courtroom. I see Andrew sitting at the defense table, wearing a camel-colored sport coat, pale-green shirt, and tan tie—an outfit that makes him look carefree, as if he were on holiday, guilty. He needs a criminal-defendant wardrobe consultant. I consider marching over to the defense table and telling Georges Bohem just that.

  I walk into the courtroom; the others follow.

  Andrew turns. He looks directly at me. He doesn’t seem surprised, disappointed, or pleased. He doesn’t smile or wave. His face is inscrutable. Is he afraid? Ashamed? Relieved? I’d thought I’d know these things.

  “Ms. Verus, please approach the witness stand and be sworn.” Murray says.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I say.

  Part II Andrew

  Betty Mae

  Professor Betty Mae Verus – bone-thin and lighter-than-the-wind – listening to Bob Dylan singing about God and Abraham, drove fast, too fast, through the dusk, north from Fakahatchee over gravel-and-dirt roads. Platinum and gold Muscogee jewelry encircled her neck, her wrists and fingers; snake-proof Gore-Tex-lined swamp boots, concealing a sheathed cold-steel hunting knife, were laced up to her calves.

  Misty air, cool and dank, infused with the faint musk of freshwater plants in bloom and the telltale rot of those in decay, its pressure falling, foretold the juggernaut of Hurricane Andrew, ravaging the Bahamas on its relentless warpath toward Florida’s southeast coast.

  Estella, Betty Mae’s sixteen-year-old pregnant daughter, look-ing out the rear window of the Pontiac station wagon— aquamarine, the color of her eyes—spat out two words: “That worm.”

  “Please,” said Betty Mae.

  “Whatever,” Estella said, fastening her seatbelt. />
  Wind, Estella and Betty Mae’s white shepherd-wolf mix, more wolf than dog, nestled in the storage bay in the back of the car between zippered nylon bags packed with tents, tarps, first-aid supplies, drums, rattles, tinctures perfected by Betty Mae’s mother, Sarah Abiaka—a Seminole medicine woman and descendant of sangomas, Zulu shamans—swamp torches, mosquito nets, and everything else necessary to survive alone in the Everglades for a month or more. These provisions, secured to iron cleats bolted to the corrugated-steel bed of the Pontiac’s rear compartment, lay beside a deflated inflatable boat and boxwood-beavertail paddles.

  As they jostled over debris on the back roads and the depressions in them, Betty Mae knew of the hurricane but wasn’t concerned. The radio was broken, she’d last heard a weather report hours earlier, but she was too intent upon escape, too apprehensive with worry to worry about what she couldn’t know. What she did know was that they were on schedule to make it safely back to their home in Miami before hurricane winds made landfall.

  Major Gabriel Verus, a marine aviator to whom she’d been married for sixteen years, had been killed in the Gulf War two years before. Karl Godfrey, Gabe’s stepbrother, had been a close member of the family. So it would have been understatement to say that Betty Mae was surprised when six months earlier she discovered that Estella was pregnant, that Karl was the father, and that he had absconded with her.

  Armed with arrest warrants for kidnapping and statutory rape, the chiefs of the Metro-Dade and the Seminole Police Departments had frequently assured Betty Mae that officers tasked with handcuffing Karl and rescuing Estella were executing their duty with diligence. That didn’t stop Betty Mae from searching on her own and, when she’d finally found them, Karl was drunk, and he’d brandished a gun.

  Tomorrow would be the first day of the Fall Semester and the first meeting of her popular class, Introduction to Metaphysics, that had garnered her an award for outstanding teaching. She never delivered a lecture the first day of class. Rather she reserved that time for the type of philosophical contemplations one might find in Plato’s dialogs, though the questions she asked were more Cartesian than Socratic. Even so her analyses would have displeased Descartes.